Siri’s Inventors Are Building a Radical New AI That Does Anything You Ask. Viv was named after the Latin root meaning live. Its San Jose, California, offices are decorated with tchotchkes bearing the numbers six and five (VI and V in roman numerals). Instead they focused on an unusual new feature: an intelligent assistant, dubbed Siri. At first Siri, endowed with a female voice, seemed almost human in the way she understood what you said to her and responded, an advance in artificial intelligence that seemed to place us on a fast track to the Singularity. She was brilliant at fulfilling certain requests, like “Can you set the alarm for 6: 3. Call Diane’s mobile phone.” And she had a personality: If you asked her if there was a God, she would demur with deft wisdom. Ask her to book a plane trip and she would point to travel websites—but she wouldn’t give flight options, let alone secure you a seat. Ask her to buy a copy of Lee Child’s new book and she would draw a blank, despite the fact that Apple sells it. Though Apple has since extended Siri’s powers—to make an Open. Table restaurant reservation, for example—she still can’t do something as simple as booking a table on the next available night in your schedule. She knows how to check your calendar and she knows how to use Open. But putting those things together is, at the moment, beyond her. Now a small team of engineers at a stealth startup called Viv Labs claims to be on the verge of realizing an advanced form of AI that removes those limitations. Whereas Siri can only perform tasks that Apple engineers explicitly implement, this new program, they say, will be able to teach itself, giving it almost limitless capabilities. In time, they assert, their creation will be able to use your personal preferences and a near- infinite web of connections to answer almost any query and perform almost any function.“Siri is chapter one of a much longer, bigger story,” says Dag Kittlaus, one of Viv’s cofounders. Before working on Viv, he helped create Siri. So did his fellow cofounders, Adam Cheyer and Chris Brigham. For the past two years, the team has been working on Viv Labs’ product—also named Viv, after the Latin root meaning live. Their project has been draped in secrecy, but the few outsiders who have gotten a look speak about it in rapturous terms. Artificial Intelligence. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the field within computer science that seeks to explain and to emulate, through mechanical or computational. Roko's basilisk is a thought experiment about the potential risks involved in developing artificial intelligence. The experiment's premise is that an all. Simple dialogs are presented using an example app that can fill out forms. The dialogs are specified in XML, and the app asks the user a series of questions to obtain. The field of artificial intelligence has become the scene of a frantic corporate arms race, with Internet giants snapping up AI startups and talent. Google recently paid a reported $5. UK deep- learning company Deep. Mind and has lured AI legends Geoffrey Hinton and Ray Kurzweil to its headquarters in Mountain View, California. Facebook has its own deep- learning group, led by prize hire Yann Le.
Cun from New York University. Their goal is to build a new generation of AI that can process massive troves of data to predict and fulfill our desires. Viv strives to be the first consumer- friendly assistant that truly achieves that promise. It wants to be not only blindingly smart and infinitely flexible but omnipresent. Viv’s creators hope that some day soon it will be embedded in a plethora of Internet- connected everyday objects. Viv founders say you’ll access its artificial intelligence as a utility, the way you draw on electricity. Simply by speaking, you will connect to what they are calling “a global brain.” And that brain can help power a million different apps and devices.“I’m extremely proud of Siri and the impact it’s had on the world, but in many ways it could have been more,” Cheyer says. I want to do something that could fundamentally change the way software is built.”Viv labs is tucked behind an unmarked door on a middle floor of a generic glass office building in downtown San Jose. Visitors enter into a small suite and walk past a pool table to get to the single conference room, glimpsing on the way a handful of engineers staring into monitors on trestle tables. Once in the meeting room, Kittlaus—a product- whisperer whose career includes stints at Motorola and Apple—is usually the one to start things off. He acknowledges that an abundance of voice- navigated systems already exists. In addition to Siri, there is Google Now, which can anticipate some of your needs, alerting you, for example, that you should leave 1. Microsoft, which has been pursuing machine- learning techniques for decades, recently came out with a Siri- like system called Cortana. Amazon uses voice technology in its Fire TV product. But Kittlaus points out that all of these services are strictly limited. Cheyer elaborates: “Google Now has a huge knowledge graph—you can ask questions like . Like Siri, it can’t do anything that coders haven’t explicitly programmed it to do. Viv breaks through those constraints by generating its own code on the fly, no programmers required. Take a complicated command like “Give me a flight to Dallas with a seat that Shaq could fit in.” Viv will parse the sentence and then it will perform its best trick: automatically generating a quick, efficient program to link third- party sources of information together—say, Kayak, Seat. Guru, and the NBA media guide—so it can identify available flights with lots of legroom. And it can do all of this in a fraction of a second. Viv is an open system that will let innumerable businesses and applications become part of its boundless brain. The technical barriers are minimal, requiring brief “training” (in some cases, minutes) for Viv to understand the jargon of the specific topic. As Viv’s knowledge grows, so will its understanding; its creators have designed it based on three principles they call its “pillars”: It will be taught by the world, it will know more than it is taught, and it will learn something every day. As with other AI products, that teaching involves using sophisticated algorithms to interpret the language and behavior of people using the system—the more people use it, the smarter it gets. By knowing who its users are and which services they interact with, Viv can sift through that vast trove of data and find new ways to connect and manipulate the information. Kittlaus says the end result will be a digital assistant who knows what you want before you ask for it. He envisions someone unsteadily holding a phone to his mouth outside a dive bar at 2 am and saying, “I’m drunk.” Without any elaboration, Viv would contact the user’s preferred car service, dispatch it to the address where he’s half passed out, and direct the driver to take him home. No further consciousness required. The founders of a stealth startup called Viv Labs—Adam Cheyer, Dag Kittlaus, and Chris Brigham—are building a Siri- like digital assistant that can process massive troves of data, teach itself, and write its own programs on the fly. The goal: to predict and fulfill our desires. Ariel Zambelich. If Kittlaus is in some ways the Steve Jobs of Viv—he is the only non- engineer on the 1. Cheyer is the company’s Steve Wozniak, the project’s key scientific mind. Unlike the whimsical creator of the Apple II, though, Cheyer is aggressively analytical in every facet of his life, even beyond the workbench. As a kid, he was a Rubik’s Cube champion, averaging 2. When he encountered programming, he dove in headfirst. And while in high school he discovered a regimen to force the world to bend to his will. I think about the words, and I tell everyone I meet, . By telling people, you’re committed to it, and they help you. It was there, in the early 2. Cheyer led the engineering of a Darpa- backed AI effort to build “a humanlike system that could sense the world, understand it, reason about it, plan, communicate, and act.” The SRI- led team built what it called a Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes, or CALO. They set some AI high- water marks, not least being the system’s ability to understand natural language. As the five- year program wound down, it was unclear what would happen next. That was when Kittlaus, who had quit his job at Motorola, showed up at SRI as an entrepreneur in residence. When he saw a CALO- related prototype, he told Cheyer he could definitely build a business from it, calling it the perfect complement to the just- released i. Phone. In 2. 00. 7, with SRI’s blessing, they licensed the technology for a startup, taking on a third cofounder, an AI expert named Tom Gruber, and eventually renaming the system Siri. The small team, which grew to include Chris Brigham, an engineer who had impressed Cheyer on CALO, moved to San Jose and worked for two years to get things right. Ultimately they had an i. Phone app that could perform a host of interesting tasks—call a cab, book a table, get movie tickets—and carry on a conversation with brio. They released it publicly to users in February 2. Three weeks later, Steve Jobs called. He wanted to buy the company.“I was shocked at how well he knew our app,” Cheyer says. At first they declined to sell, but Jobs persisted. His winning argument was that Apple could expose Siri to a far wider audience than a startup could reach. He promised to promote it as a key element on every i. Phone. Apple bought the company in April 2. The core Siri team came to Apple with the project. But as Siri was honed into a product that millions could use in multiple languages, some members of the original team reportedly had difficulties with executives who were less respectful of their vision than Jobs was. Cheyer departed several months later. They asked one another what they thought the world would be like in five years. As they drew ideas on a whiteboard in Kittlaus’ house, Brigham brought up the idea of a program that could put the things it knows together in new ways. As talks continued, they lit on the concept of a cloud- based intelligence, a global brain. Before the sale, Siri had partnered with around 4. All. Menus. com to Yahoo; Apple had rolled Siri out with less than half a dozen.
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